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Trade Theory and Trade Facts∗

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Trade Theory and Trade Facts∗ Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Research Department Staff Report 284 March 2001 (First version October 1999) Trade Theory and Trade Facts∗ Raphael Bergoeing ILADES-Georgetown University, Universidad Alberto Hurtado Timothy J. Kehoe University of Minnesota and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis ABSTRACT This paper quantitatively tests the “new trade theory” based on product differentiation, increasing returns, and imperfect competition. We employ a standard model, which allows both changes in the distribution of income among industrialized countries, emphasized by Helpman and Krugman (1985), and nonhomothetic preferences, emphasized by Markusen (1986), to effect trade directions and volumes. In addition, we generalize the model to allow changes in relative prices to have large effects. We test the model by calibrating it to 1990 data and then “backcasting” to 1961 to see what changes in crucial variables between 1961 and 1990 are predicted by the theory. The results show that, although the model is capable of explaining much of the increased concentration of trade among industrialized countries, it is not capable of explaining the enormous increase in the ratio of trade to income. Our analysis suggests that it is policy changes, rather than the elements emphasized in the new trade theory, that have been the most significant determinants of the increase in trade volume. ∗ c 2001, Raphael Bergoeing and Timothy J. Kehoe. This paper grew out of the Bergoeing’s 1996 Ph.D. thesis at° the University of Minnesota. The authors thank the McKnight Foundation and the National Science Foundation for financial support. Useful comments and suggestions have been provided by participants in numerous seminars and conferences, especially Caroline Betts, Harold Cole, Barbara Craig, Patrick Kehoe, David Hummels, Robert Lucas, Moshe Syrquin, Nancy Stokey, and Jaume Ventura. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. 1. Introduction This paper investigates the extent to which the “new trade theory” can quantitatively match some of the facts that it was designed to explain. It does so by calibrating a standard model,basedonMarkusen(1986), to 1990 data and then “backcasting” to 1961 to see what changes in crucial variables between 1961 and 1990 are predicted by the theory. Thenewtradetheory,developedbyresearcherslikeHelpman(1981), Krugman (1979), and Lancaster (1980) in the late 1970s and 1980s, was motivated by the failure of more traditional theories to explain some of the most significant facts about post World War II trade data. As Deardorff (1984) and Helpman and Krugman (1985) explain, the new trade theory was designed to account for three major facts: The ratio of trade to income has increased. • Trade has become more concentrated among industrialized countries. • Trade among industrialized countries has been largely intraindustry trade. • Figure 1 presents evidence for the first fact, showing how much faster world trade has increased than world income. To make comparisons easy in the figure, data on both world trade volume, measured by summing up exports throughout the world, and world income have been expressed as indices where 1950=100. Over the period 1950-1990, the ratio of trade to income worldwide increases by 86.1 percent. The data for both trade and income used to derive the indices in Figure 1 are measured in constant 1970 U.S. dollars. Alternatively, we could look at trade as a fraction of income, dividing the current value of trade by the current value of income. As a fraction of the value of GDP, the value of trade increased from 7.9 percent in 1950 to 15.4 percent in 1990, a 94.9 percent increase. To make the second fact precise, we identify industrialized countries with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which was formed in 1961. Figure 2 shows how much faster trade within the OECD has increased than OECD trade with the rest of the world. The ratio of OECD-OECD trade to OECD-RW trade went from 0.84 in 1961 to 1.58 in 1990. Evidence for the third fact can be found in the high Grubel-Lloyd indices of international trade in industrialized countries. For this sort of data it is more difficult to calculate long time series. In 1990 though, Grubel-Lloyd indices based on two-digit SITC data from the OECD say that 68.4 percent of OECD-OECD trade was intraindustry compared with only 38.1 percent of OECD-RW trade. Closely related to the first two facts is yet a fourth fact: The ratio of trade to income withintheOECDincreasedevenfasterthantheratiooftradetoincomeworldwide. Figure3 presents the relevant data. Trade within the OECD went from 5.3 percent of OECD income in 1961 to 11.2 percent in 1990. The ratio of trade to income within the OECD increased by 111.5 percent. By comparison the United Nations data say that the ratio of trade to income worldwide increased by only 59.3 percent over 1961-1990. That the new trade theory was developed to explain these facts is explicit in textbook expositions by the developers of the theory. Helpman and Krugman (1985), for example, point out that conventional trade models like the Ricardian model and the Heckscher-Ohlin model cannot hope to explain these facts and go on to say, These ... empirical weaknesses of conventional trade theory ... become under- standable once economies of scale and imperfect competition are introduced into our analysis. 2 Helpman and Krugman stress the changes in the distribution of income among industrialized countries as a major cause of the expansion of trade relative to income. In the early post war period the United States accounted for much of the world’s income and consumption. As the distribution of national income became more equal, their model predicts that trade volumes should rise. Focusing on the increase in trade among industrialized countries, Markusen (1986) stresses unequal income elasticity of demands that result from nonhomothetic preferences. If demand for differentiated products is superior to that for homogeneous products, then intraindustry trade should expand as income rises; and, if industrialized countries are net ex- porters of these differentiated products, then intraindustry trade among industrialized coun- tries should expand faster than other trade. As Markusen et al. (1995) point out, it was to match the facts listed above that the theory had been formulated: Thus, nonhomogeneous demand leads to a decrease in North-South trade and to an increase in [intraindustry trade] among the northern industrialized countries. These are precisely the facts there were to be explained. Our model generalizes those developed by Helpman and Krugman (1985) and Markusen (1986) in that it allows changes in relative prices to have large effects on trade volumes. Be- cause of faster total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector, the relative prices of manufactured goods have fallen sharply from 1961 to 1990 compared to the prices of primary goods and services. Our numerical experiments show that, although the model can explain the increased concentration of trade among industrialized countries, it is not capable of explaining the 3 enormous increase in the ratio of trade to income. The simple fact is that it has been the trade of manufactured goods among OECD countries that accounts for most of the expansion of trade over the period 1961-1990. Over this same period, however, the consumption of manufactures in these countries has gone down as a fraction of income. A model that relies on the taste for variety approach developed by Spence (1976) and Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) links increases in trade to increases in consumption. It seems that it is policy changes, rather than the elements emphasized in the new trade theory, that have been the most significant determinants of the increase in trade volume. In related literature, Hunter (1991) estimates that nonhomothetic preferences accounts for about one fourth of observed interindustry trade. Helpman (1987) reports regression results that he interprets as support for the Helpman-Krugman explanation of the distribution of national income as the driving force behind trade increases. Hummels and Levinsohn (1995), however, argue that Helpman’s results are not related to the Helpman-Krugman theory. Haveman and Hummels (1999) argue that the new trade theory models rely on taste for variety that is not consistent with the data and predict too much trade. Yi (1999) argues that the new trade theory models cannot account for the increase in trade unless they incorporate changes in both trade policy and international vertical integration. It is worth noting that lack of data on trade in services in 1961 forces us to restrict our attention to merchandise trade in both our data analysis and in our theory. Information on sources for all of the data presented in this paper are included in the data appendix. 4 2. A “New Trade Theory” Model Consider a world in which there are n developed countries, identified with the 23 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1990, and a rest of the world. (There were actually 24 countries in the OECD in 1990, but, since data for Belgium and Luxembourg are aggregated together, we treat them as one country.) Table 1 OECD in 1990 Country Share of Income (percent) Australia 1.3209 Austria 0.7153 Belgium/Luxembourg 0.9254 Canada 2.5475 Denmark 0.5791 Finland 0.6046 France 5.3609 Germany 7.3549 Greece 0.3718 Iceland 0.0280 Ireland 0.2042 Italy 4.9059 Japan 13.3195 Netherlands 1.2721 New Zealand 0.1933 Norway 0.5177 Portugal 0.3027 Spain 2.2189 Sweden 1.0304 Switzerland 0.1274 Turkey 0.6757 United Kingdom 4.3747 United States 24.9076 In each country or region, there are three types of goods, a primary good that is tradable and homogeneous, manufactured goods that are tradable and differentiated by the firm that produces them, and a service good that is nontradable and homogeneous within the 5 country where it is produced.
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